Bhumi

The Story

Bhumi is Sanskrit for earth: the ground beneath us, revered as a mother who holds and nourishes all life. In KURU's Abstract Collection it takes the studio's entire embroidery vocabulary and releases it from the job of describing anything. What remains is a deep red linen field broken into irregular landmasses, read like ground seen from above. Each region is given over to a single technique and left to hold its own ground, like plots of land side by side: raised gold bead mounds gathered in rows, open white honeycomb netting drawn in fine thread, fields of lime green chain loops and blue and green cross stitch, drifts of violet and white French knots, and pale linen islands rising from the red, their borders traced in bright couched cord. There is no centre and no narrative. The eye is meant to wander, and the pleasure is in the crossings, the seam where one hand stops and another begins.

The restraint of the palette is what holds it together. Almost everything is madder red, brick and oxblood, with cream and gold carrying the light and a few passages of purple, blue, olive and lilac interrupting just enough to keep the surface awake. Bands of short satin dashes fan out like furrows in a field, and fine gold bugle thread wanders across the boundaries. At close range the piece becomes a working record of technique: knot beside stitch beside bead beside void, each worked at a different height so the surface has genuine relief. It belongs to the sampler tradition, the cloth on which a maker sets down everything she knows, scaled up and composed as a landscape.

Bhumi is Plate VII of the Abstract Collection, created under the artistic direction of Shantnu Sihag Dhul, trained at Istituto Marangoni and Rubelli Venice. Each artwork is entirely hand embroidered, and the intricacy of materials and technique means no two pieces can ever be truly identical. Every artwork carries its own character, impossible to replicate exactly by hand, and is accompanied by a signed Certificate of Authenticity.